Keep in touch, p.10
Keep in Touch, page 10
The Symposium attendees roared.
Chapter Twenty-Eight No Routine Prof
Coaxing dollars out of the administration and luring top-notch new faculty members to join his department were only a part of David’s role at York University. This C student, voted by his peers at Victoria College as “most likely to fail,” was going to teach, too. With his well-nourished sense of humour, Professor Dave must have enjoyed the irony. Socializing had routinely played a key part in his earlier academic pursuits, from secondary school to university. Still, innate intelligence mixed with unshakeable self-confidence, resourcefulness, and enthusiasm, as well the gift of making connections (and keeping them), had led him to groundbreaking work at the Canada Council and now at the post-secondary academic level. And so, he took on a teaching role in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University.
Professor Silcox’s first assignment was Introduction to Visual Arts (VA 111), a compulsory three-hour weekly offering for first-year students. No ordinary presentation this! With David (with no academic background in fine arts) as master of ceremonies, a star-studded line-up of high-profile individuals in the visual arts field appeared weekly in his class. They shared their work, expertise, stories, and advice with a rapt classroom of students. Liz Wylie, artist, author, retired Curator of the Kelowna Art Gallery, and a 1977 graduate of the fine arts program at York University, provides personal memories of the VA 111 student body: “It was the golden age of York, founded by academic rebels who had fled the University of Toronto to start again with fresh, new, and exciting ideas. Many of the students were rebels too — lots of American draft dodgers and radicals.”6 Liz herself had gravitated to York fine arts to find others — students and faculty members — who thought outside the box. It seems that Professor Silcox could provide just the inspiration she needed.
Fifty years later, she spoke of the allure of David’s VA 111 class. “Once a week, we’d file into the lecture hall for David’s class. He was the host and he regularly featured interesting speakers from a wide range of disciplines. And of course,” she adds, “from his years at the Canada Council, David knew everybody — and many of them made guest appearances for us — Michael Snow, Jack Shadbolt, among other artists in his ‘show and tell.’”
As magnanimous a member of fine arts at York as he was the Canada Council’s Senior Arts Officer, David Silcox kindly assisted a number of his artist friends to find employment on campus. One was an old friend, conceptual artist Iain Baxter, who taught full-time at the faculty from 1972 to 1974 and part-time for some years after that. Coach House Publisher Stan Bevington, who’d known the generosity of David Silcox during the latter’s Canada Council days, was another beneficiary of David’s motto, “taking care of arts friends.” “He put a word in to hire me at York to do some instructing on the publishing and printing process,” remembers Stan. “David was far ahead of his time in thinking about so many things. He felt that faculty should also be practicing artists — that they made what they were teaching more real for the students.”7
David’s generosity and kindness came in other forms. Stan has fond recollections of occasionally hitching a ride with David from the city into the then rural environment of the York campus. “One day we had to swing by Victoria College so David could pick up Northrup Frye, who was coming to York for some reason. Northrup Frye! And me in the back seat! What a delight listening to the conversation between those two,” he laughs.
* * *
While David was helping to build a faculty and extending his influence deeper into the art world, Mimi had embarked on her new life in Toronto. The couple had purchased a home near Upper Canada College but did not settle in well to the design or location. Within a year, they had moved to a condominium in the Forest Hill area of the city. Mimi originally took a marketing position with the magazine Saturday Night and later moved to the Richmond Advertising Agency as Vice-President. Mimi was also an inveterate lover of art, and she was delighted to later take a job at the Marlborough-Godard Gallery. A subsidiary of the Mira Godard Gallery, Marlborough-Godard was one of the premier art galleries of Toronto. With the 1972 opening of the Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa, she accepted a position there — commuting back to Toronto on weekends for the next two years. “It did take me some time to find my place,” she admits.8
Chapter Twenty-Nine Multi-Tasking
Liz Wylie, reflecting on her long acquaintance with David Silcox, first as a student, later as a personal friend, calls to mind their York University days: “He didn’t fit the mold as a university professor, by any means, and it was obvious that he didn’t want to be tied down to an academic role.” She adds, candidly, “some people in the department didn’t like him for it — the way he kind of did his own thing; the way he breezed in and out. But I don’t think it bothered him in the slightest about what other people said. He just worked around it.”9
“Breezing out” included David’s growing professional liaisons, memberships, and leadership roles in arts and civic organizations, both in the city and further afield. In a 2017 recording, held in the National Archives of Canada, the then eighty-year-old interviewee jokes that during his university days at Victoria College, he had “specialized in extracurricular activities.”10 He had obviously pulled up his academic socks somewhere along the way, but the extracurricular bug still buzzed loudly around his shaggy locks. Two years into his York appointment, David Silcox was a contributing member, often as Chair, of no less than eleven institutions. They included the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC, later Telefilm Canada), Massey Hall/Roy Thompson Hall, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the International Sculpture Conference, the board of the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, the Art Gallery of Ontario Acquisitions Committee, the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, the Jewish Community Centre, the Koffler Centre, the Association of Cultural Executives, and the federal Department of Public Works.11 And while all these commitments took time and energy, it was David’s work in film development that significantly raised his profile as a burgeoning Canadian arts mover and shaker. Canadian films in the mid-century? Ah! What a shambles!
As a keen observer of Canadian culture — visual arts, music, theatre, and dance — of the late 1950s to mid-1960s, David Silcox must have viewed the Canadian film industry as an endangered species. And he’d have been right. Between 1960 and 1965, there were fewer than fifty Canadian-produced English-language films (including documentaries, shorts, and animation). When he returned from the Courtauld Institute in 1964 and took his place at the Canada Council for the Arts, however, signs of life were emerging. In 1967, the federal government under the departing Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson founded the CFDC, allocating fifty million dollars in support of the country’s feature film industry.12 At York University in the early 1970s, David Silcox, now wearing the mantle of Associate Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, wanted to be among the forces nurturing the embers of the film industry into flames.
Joining the board of the CFDC in 1971, David and colleagues got down to brass tacks. (David’s commitment to the CFDC would remain a priority over the coming years, as he acceded to Vice-Chair of the powerful committee in 1974, then to Chair in 1981.) Foremost among CFDC goals was to raise the visibility of the films it was funding. This was no grassroots task, but a national one, facilitated by either legislation guaranteeing the distribution and exhibition of Canadian films or by employing foreign talent alongside Canadian. A promising first step saw the Ontario Ministry of Industry and Tourism appoint broadcasting executive John Bassett to head a task force to study the state of the Canadian film industry. The conclusion of the 1973 Bassett Report found that while “a basic film industry exists; it is the audiences that need to be nurtured through theatrical exposure.” The Bassett Report concluded that “the optimum method of accomplishing this is to establish a quota system for theatres.”13
David’s early years on the board of the CFDC were marked by both success and disappointment. Ted Kotcheff’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), starring Richard Dreyfuss, and based on Mordecai Richler’s novel of the same name, received Academy Award nominations, as did Ján Kadár’s Lies My Father Told Me (1975). Alas, not enough glory to bury abysmal products such as The Vulture (1966), Cosmic Zoom (1968), and Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969).
* * *
York University duties and committee responsibilities — a dozen at least — filled the days, and evenings, too. Tucked securely into David Silcox’s Queen’s Scouts knapsack also lay what he called the “Milne project.” His fascination with the artist took form after his return from the Courtauld in the mid-1960s, and it only deepened during his York University years. Mimi Fullerton, keeping the home fires burning, explained the deepening thrust: “David had more flexibility with his time at York than during [his] Canada Council days.”14 Ultimately, it was time to move the Milne book, which he had been nurturing now for ten years, out into the world.
Milne’s son, David Milne Jr., had become involved in the Silcox-led project before David had left Ottawa and the Canada Council. By 1968, the pair now focused on finding the location of various Milne paintings scattered across the planet, identifying them, and photographing them. Silcox’s Canada Council connections proved to be golden in this respect. “Since I knew nearly everybody in the art gallery and museum world in Canada, finding Milne’s paintings was relatively easy and straightforward,” David recalled in his unpublished work “The Milne Chronicles”: “Arranging to see, photograph, catalogue, measure, and assess each work was a task of Herculean size.”15 Although the Milne estate itself held numerous paintings in addition to those being stored at the National Gallery in Ottawa, the two Davids estimated that “nearly two thousand works were sprinkled across the country — even cropping up in countries around the globe, including the USA, Bermuda, Scotland, England, Israel, Russia, India, Mexico, France, Norway, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand.”16
Identifying and photographing Milne works was one thing; writing the text for the book was another. Given permission by the Milne estate to begin copying Milne’s vast collection of personal writings, David dug in. He embraced an “aha!” moment that struck him while others were sleeping, and he conceived a plan to widen the focus on Milne’s world. He’d present a seminar on David Milne to York’s senior fine arts students.
Former York fine arts student John O’Brian, a future author, art historian, and curator, best known for his scholarly work Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, recalled, in a 2023 interview, his golden era with Professor Silcox. “I can honestly say that David changed my life. I was a wide-eyed York University student in David Silcox’s senior seminar on David Milne. David would bring all his slides, books, ephemera to class and talk to us about Milne’s life and his art. I was so taken by the subject, as David presented it, that I decided that I would do my M.A. thesis on David Milne.”17 O’Brian shared this plan with his instructor, and he recalled David responding with “nothing but positivity and generosity. David was always so helpful to me in this project, even putting me in touch with David Milne Jr. for assistance.”
Too occupied to supervise O’Brian’s thesis work himself, David passed the task on to his colleague and incoming Associate Dean of Faculty, Joyce Zemans. Zemans was impressed with the quality of O’Brian’s work and (with David’s encouragement) urged him to take the scholarly work a step further and move toward publication. And so connections came full circle when old friend Stan Bevington, Publisher of Coach House Press and former beneficiary of Silcox care and interest via the Canada Council, played his part in helping John O’Brian achieve his heady goal.
O’Brian recalled, “Michael Ondaatje, who was on Coach House’s editorial board, read the manuscript, made comments, and was very complimentary.”18 In 1983, his book David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting was published. It was, at the time, the first major study of the painter. O’Brian pays tribute to David Silcox for his encouragement of all his students’ hopes and dreams: “It was always only positivity and encouragement with David. There was never anything like stepping on toes, such as ‘I thought of the Milne project first and it’s going to be bigger and better than yours’ attitude from David. He just had a generosity of spirit; he was glad to help, if and when he could.”19
If David Silcox’s life at this juncture could be given artistic representation, “abstract expressionism” comes to mind. By 1975, he had at least two other irons in his ever-burning fire. An old friend, artist Harold Town, was suggesting a joint project digging into the life and art of painter Tom Thomson. And there was more. He’d been commissioned by the City of Toronto to undertake a comprehensive report on the state of culture in the ever-striving city.
Chapter Thirty Pretty Please?
In 1974, Associate Dean and Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University David P. Silcox was still confounding the finance gurus with his slide rule. He was wowing students, too, with his class parade of the “who’s who” of the Canadian art world. Now, though, he found himself presented with a tempting offer from the Chair of Metro Toronto, Paul Godfrey. He recalled the invitation to attendees at the Mavor Moore Cultural Symposium in 2008: “I was invited to prepare a report on the state of culture in Metro Toronto. The feeling was that cultural conditions hadn’t changed much since Metro was formed 20 years before.”20
Godfrey himself, in a 2023 interview with this author, acknowledged targeting Silcox for the job. “People in the know, back then, told me that I needed someone to research and create the report — somebody who was not only not capable and talented, but someone who had a heart for arts. That person was David Silcox.”21
David “give-me-even-more-to-do” Silcox was delighted with the request and couldn’t agree more with Godfrey’s assessment of the moribund state of culture in Canada’s largest city. While the fervour of Canada’s Centennial and Expo 67 had ramped up interest in the role that culture played in Canada’s sea-to-sea-to-sea landscape, David acknowledged that there had been little progress once the patriotic fervour had lessened. Silcox’s feeling (later repeated in his 1974 report for Metro Toronto) was that City Hall viewed the arts as “a luxury and a frill which affected the lives of few people and were thought not to be widely available or desired by many.”22
Eager for new challenges and opportunities, Silcox (no doubt over lunch or dinner) took on the assignment. He’d continue his duties at York while (assisted by municipal employees) seeking out and gathering details for the project, ultimately producing the report. With some amusement, David later related the financial details of the arrangement: “When I was asked what my fee would be for preparing and writing the report, I suggested $2500. ‘Oh we can’t do it that way,’ I was informed. ‘We pay $55 a day for such consultative work.’ By the time I’d done my work over 30 days of interviewing and writing, it tallied over $3000!”23
Over the ensuing weeks, through public meetings and small group or private consultations, David sought input on the state of the arts in Metro Toronto. He interviewed mayors, aldermen, and municipal administrators, as well as federal and provincial representatives, professional and amateur artists, the staffs of arts organizations, and “interested persons” in each of the five boroughs, including the City of Toronto proper. Reporters who followed the City Hall beat were also asked for their two cents’ worth.
No doubt, David gave silent thanks along the way for the sage advice he’d internalized as a youth from his father, the Rev. Albert Phillips Silcox, MBE. “As a pastor, Dad had the philosophy of ‘listen to everybody — not just those at the top — with politeness, respect, and an open heart, whether they agree with you or not.’”24 No mean task when it came to convincing politicians of the value of culture. Dutiful son of a wise father, David had learned to walk the tightrope.
In this respect, he humorously recalled a past cross-country Canada Council art jury tour with artists Yves Gaucher and Ken Lochhead in tow as the jury looked for civic support for the arts in the western provinces. “We’d stopped briefly in Saskatoon, where their arts community was lobbying for a new art gallery. Mayor Buchwald was first on our list to see. It turned out to be a delightful visit — weather, football, and wheat were all discussed, as well as culture in Saskatoon. As we were leaving, the mayor called me aside and admitted, ‘that’s the first time I’d ever met artists … and you couldn’t tell.’”25 It seems a number of mid-1970s Toronto bigwigs held similar views as Buchwald. That cast included the Borough of York’s Mayor Gayle Christie; Etobicoke’s Dennis Flynn; East York’s Alan Redway; Scarborough’s Gus Harris; North York’s Mel Lastman, and the City of Toronto’s Mayor, David Crombie. Lastman, a voluble rabble-rouser and maverick, led the “no more money for culture” voice.
After more than a month of consultation, collection, compilation, and revision for Godfrey’s report, the fifty-page “Metropolitan Toronto’s Support of the Arts: A Study of the Problems with Recommendations for Future Policies and Procedures” (henceforth called the Silcox Report) was distributed to Metro government officials and their staffs. The researcher’s introduction to the report, in what would become a trademark of his written style in these assignments, was patently clear and concise, showing strong research and command of language. It was delivered with flair, even humour and bravado. At the outset, the author advises readers to skip much of the report! He indicates: “Reports often have a tendency to begin boring their readers on the first page. I therefore recommend the Introduction and the Summary of Recommendations as the only essential reading: the gist of things is contained there.”26
